Friday, August 01, 2014

Professional Left Podcast #243

"The art of using troops is this:

When ten to the enemy’s one, surround him;When five times his strength, attack him;If double his strength, divide him;If equally matched you may engage him;If weaker numerically, be capable of withdrawing;And if in all respects unequal, be capable of eluding him, for a small force is but booty for one more powerful."

14 comments:

Anonymous
said...

To take out the Republican party you have to take out Christianity. That's what powers it.

Sure there are moderate Christians, just like moderate Republicans. But both of them just serve to give cover to the problem, they have to be crushed,shamed, and destroyed first. Mentioning Christian faith has to be socially dooming, and it's starting to be so. Once they are gone we can go for the root cause.

And just as moderate Christians point to the good it did in the past and the rare good public figures from it today, well just as with conservatism that has fuck all to do with what it is now, and has been for some time.

Once we turn the phrase "I'm a Christian" into just as much of a social, career, and economic killer as "I'm in the KKK" we can crush the Republicans.

Till we do that, or if we aren't willing to do that, we'll never get rid of the fucking Christians that drive the Republican party.

Let's get rid the root cause, Christianity, and start with those who give that religion cover.

As I see it, Monster from the Id and the anon to whom he replied make the same mistake: they use "Christianity" as an umbrella term to represent both the teachings of Jesus and what James Madison called "the legal establishment of Christianity" that began with the accession of Constantine as emperor in Rome and officially ended, at least here in Unistat, with the passage of the Bill of Rights. If I had written Id's contribution, I would have listed that legal establishment among the things which the teachings of Jesus have somehow managed to survive, despite the other results listed by Madison:

More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution. Enquire of the Teachers of Christianity for the ages in which it appeared in its greatest lustre; those of every sect, point to the ages prior to its incorporation with Civil policy. Propose a restoration of this primitive State in which its Teachers depended on the voluntary rewards of their flocks, many of them predict its downfall. On which Side ought their testimony to have greatest weight, when for or when against their interest?

With all due respect to G.K. Chesterton, the legal establishment of Christianity has been tried, and like Sir Adhemar, it has absolutely been found wanting. It's the teachings of Jesus -- love and forgiveness and the rest of that tree-hugging hippy crap -- that have, by too many of us, been found difficult and left untried.

I would simply add that the majority of progressives self identify as Christian. While atheists are an important part of our coalition, there are simply not enough of them to make a dent on American politics by themselves.

Let us call true Christianity "the Christianity of Jesus Christ", and the other kind "State Christianity".

State Christianity began with its becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire, which gave the Church a vested interest in an unjust social order, which in turn gave the Church motive to compromise its principles to maintain the injustices on which that Empire depended. This corruption continued in the State Churches of other states which adopted one or another sect of State Christianity as their official religion.

One reason Christianity has remained a strong force in the culture of the USA is that we did not have a corrupt, plutocrat-serving, persecuting, warmongering, Official State Church to turn the masses cynical about Christianity, as happened in Europe.

I forgot to add that those modern USAmerican Christians who want a sort of generic State Christianity to become the de facto official religion of the USA fail to understand that the lack of establishment is what has kept Christianity, of both the humanistic kind and the authoritarian kind, strong forces in USAmerican culture.

We can't fix the Republican party or conservatism till Christianity is like the KKK. Just as in the Nordic countries.

Christianity is a hate group, with some people giving it cover by claiming to be liberal Christians. We take them out through killing the social safety net and starving flyover, then we fix this country.

Only once they are dead and their faith an object of mockery can this country improve. We just need to buck up and take the moderates first. Then we go for the political centrists who serve the same function, but for a far less idiotic and toxic cause.

I'm not sure who's worse: "anon"(really Geese Howard again) tying to push the "Xtianity and GOPism are inextricably fused" argument, a bullshit claim even to this hardened atheist, or Revanchist from Under the Bridge, who seems to forget that faith is dying as science pushes it out of the gaps it's inserted itself into over time ("Og not understand how sun work. Og call sun God.") and that's why so much of it has retreated into navel-gazing horseshit, feel-good platitudes, and far-right-nutjob-swearing-that-the-world-is-6K-years-old denialism.